Swathed in yards of pearl gray stone marten and crowned with a purple turban, Elizabeth Taylor rode through the streets of Cambridge, Mass., in a 1948 Lincoln convertible like Queen for a Day. The rubric, however, was Woman of the Year, bestowed on Liz last week by Harvard's 133-year-old Hasty Pudding theatrical society. Recalling that in 1951 she had been voted "worst actress in the world" by the Harvard Lampoon, Liz, 45, chuckled: "They didn't have to tell me." This time around, she received tributes to her "great artistic skills and feminine qualities"; the latter presumably commemorated her matrimonial stardom. As Sixth Husband John Warner looked on proudly, the actress accepted an enormous Hasty Pudding spoon "for making a big stir wherever she goes" and a 6-in. hunk of Lucite cut in the shape of a diamond. She held it next to her beringed finger, then gasped in mock alarm: "It's a fake!"
"I've built it into my schedule. I do everything else around it," says Illinois Governor James Thompson, 40. The all-important "it" is his exercise routine. The 6-ft. 6-in., 210-lb. Governor makes three trips a week to the Nautilus health club in Springfield, Ill., to pump iron, jog, and work out on elaborate stretching machines. Says he: "This job is a man killer. You can absorb only so many budgets, meetings and job seekers without saying 'I've got to do something where I don't have to think.' " But after an hour in the gym, he insists, he can "go back to work in the evening and tackle three more hours of budgets with a clear head."
The candlelit setting looked like something out of a sultan's palace. The guests at Washington's Iranian embassy, however, were not princes and potentates, but Artist Jamie Wyeth, HUD Secretary Patricia Harris, Fashion Doyenne Diana Vreeland and a hundred other partygoers invited to Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi's Valentine's Night bash. The guest of honor: Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who earlier in the day had met President Carter at the White House. "Terrific, terrific," was Warhol's response to everything, including the centerpiece on the red satin tablecloth: a 3-ft. floral heart adorned with an oversized Campbell's Soup can.
"It's like working for Napoleon. She's a great general," says Actress Candice Bergen of her latest director, Lino Wertmuller. Bergen and Giancarlo Giannini are in Rome filming A Night Full of Rain, Wertmuller's first movie in English. To make it, Wertmuller says, is like "flying blind." Giannini spent six months studying the language for his part as an English-speaking Italian journalist. As for Bergen, cast as a former American college radical who falls in love with Giancarlo, she has different language problems. "At this point, my English is beginning to break up," she says. "I find myself saying things like 'We go for to eat something in the bar.' "